Sometimes you have to go were it takes you.

I love to play with the images. For example I shot a fun girl last week. The theme was Pin up. We had a lot of fun and there were several really good images. I processed them one by one and things were going smoothly.

Then one image became an issue. It had a red cast that just wouldn't respond to editing. It didn't want to be like the other images. Rather than fight with the image I decided to work with it.

With all that red a black and white conversion with red filter was the way to go. Sort of. The image ended up very high key that way and the pose didn't lend itself to a high key shot. I backed the layer down and then the eyes didn't look right.

Then I suddenly knew what to do. I went back and started from scratch. I isolated the eyes and changed the color to a warm gold tone, then masked them out and applied the black and white treatment to the unmasked sections of the image. The bw was still to hard so I backed off the layer until her face was an eerie mix of color and pale.

I love the "not quite a vampire" style that the image turned into. In the small thumbnail the eyes just have a glow to them which I find appealing. In the larger version you can see more of the slightly unnatural golden color which adds to the mystique of the innocent vampire.

This is a great example of the fluidity of photography. You can't always predetermine the feel or the point of the image. Sometimes the image has to tell you what it wants.

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